'Women Helping Women': Domestic-skills Training for Unwed Mothers

The Sophia Little Home in Cranston, Rhode Island, was a private association founded in 1881 by women to help women. It initially catered primarily to alcoholic women, but evolved in the early twentieth century to care predominantly for unwed mothers. For the former, the staff promoted hard work and discipline as a form of therapy to heal women of the temptations of alcohol; for the latter, the staff emphasized the development of marketable skills for unwed mothers to support themselves and their children once they left the Home. This vocational education included planting and harvesting gardens, caring for cows and hens, cleaning, cooking, sewing, braiding rugs, stitching their own clothes, and needle work. In addition to the goal of moral rehabilitation, these programs also allowed the women to feel useful rather than mere objects of charity. The approach with alcoholics was not as successful as staff had hoped: many clients were older women set in their ways; recidivism rates hovered between seventy-five and ninety percent. The staff found much more success with young unwed mothers who were still impressionable and desired reintegration into society. Despite the social stigma against unwed mothers, many left the Home with respectable jobs based on the skills they had learned during confinement. Although the staff did not use occupational terminology in their records, their approach to reintegrating shunned women into society relied on the ideas and beliefs of the early occupational therapy movement in the early twentieth century.